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A Swedish Diplomat and His
Reporting
on the
Holocaust
by Mose Apelblat
There are no worse or better nations. There are worse
and better governments. Nations don’t like wars. The
governments conduct politics that lead to wars; then,
they ask the nations to sacrifice.
I was an insignificant little man. My mission was important.
All nations under Hitler’s occupation suffered losses,
millions of victims. However, all the Jews were victims.
Let no nation, any government or church appropriate
this holy and cursed term. The Holocaust belongs to the
Jews.2
Jan Karski
started this study with the objective of finding Göran von
Otter’s missing report. The result of my modest effort to
clarify the whereabouts of his reporting will be described in
this article. The article also draws attention to the moral dilemmas that both Karski and von Otter must have faced, in very
different circumstances, when learning about the atrocities and
reporting about them in order to arouse their governments and
world opinion.
Göran von Otter was a Swedish diplomat with a baron’s title
(“friherre” in Swedish). His grandfather had been prime minister of Sweden. He did his military service in the Swedish navy,
graduated in law, and practiced a few years at a Swedish court
before joining the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During
the Second World War he served as legation3 secretary at the
Swedish legation in Berlin where he mainly worked with judicial
questions and the return to Sweden of Swedish Jews.4 After the
war he continued his career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
with different assignments at the ministry and abroad until his
retirement in 1973.
Von Otter happened to meet Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who
had studied engineering and medicine and become department
head at the “Institute of Hygiene” of the Waffen SS at the central
SS headquarters.5 There, he soon was in charge of “disinfection”
and the delivery of poisonous gases. However, he was deeply
Christian with a moral conscience. After his sister-in-law had
died mysteriously at a mental hospital, he decided to expose the
Nazi extermination machinery and undertook to collect information from within. His wish was to convey the information to a
neutral country and to drop leaflets on Germany in the hope of
raising public opinion against the Nazi regime.
The two met accidentally on a train between Warsaw and Berlin, presumably on the night between the 20th and 21st of August
1942. Von Otter was returning to Berlin after having met some
arrested Swedish businessmen in Warsaw. Gerstein was returning
from the extermination camp Bełżec, where he had witnessed
mass killings of Jews by gas, which had completely devastated
him. Unable to rest, he had to tell someone about his feelings. He
noticed that von Otter had lit a cigarette with a Swedish match and
turned to him. A person from neutral Sweden, a diplomat as it
turned out, was the perfect person to trust —and in whom to confide a secret to be published. Or so Gerstein must have thought.
Jan Karski and his reporting
6
At about the same time that von Otter met Gerstein, a Polish officer and diplomat named Jan Karski7 embarked on a “highly dangerous mission”8 in his occupied country. Born in Łodź in 1914, a
city known for its textile industry employing many Jewish work-
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Göran von Otter.
9
Jan Karski, 1944.
ers,9 he trained as an officer in the Polish army, studied law and
not escape retribution”.13 In practice, however, not much was
international relations, and started to work at the Polish Ministry done to stop the genocide and save any surviving Jews. The war
of Foreign Affairs. At the outbreak of the war, he was mobilized
against the Nazi German armed forces took precedence, and any
and fought in eastern Poland. After the collapse of the war efmilitary action to bomb the extermination camps was seen as a
fort, he stayed behind and acted as a courier between the Polish
distraction and never carried out. The Allied powers might also
government in exile in London and the resistance movement
have been afraid that any military measures against the exterin Poland, and made secret trips between
mination of the Jews would have fueled the
Poland, France, and Britain. At one point he
Nazi propaganda that the Allies were fighting
was arrested and tortured by Gestapo but
for the Jews.14
The Polish officer Jan Karski (1914–
Karski did his utmost to inform British
managed to escape.
2000) risked his life reporting on the
and American leaders, including the British
In the summer of 1942, according to
Holocaust. A Swedish diplomat, Göran
foreign minister Anthony Eden and the US
Robert Wistrich,10 Karski toured the Warvon Otter (1907–1988), is also assumed
saw ghetto with Jewish guides11 and saw the
president Franklin Roosevelt, and to urge
to have reported in late 1942 on the
results of the deportations and the Nazi Gerthem to act. In October 1944, he published
Holocaust. But there seems to be no
man extermination policy at first hand. He
a book, Courier from Poland: The Story of a
trace of von Otter’s report.
also visited eastern Poland and scouted in
Secret State15 (republished in 2013), on the un12
During the war von Otter worked at the
derground Polish state in occupied Poland,
the vicinity of the Bełżec death camp. He
Swedish legation in Berlin. In 1942 he
identified Treblinka and Sobibór as places of
including information from his mission,
met an SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who
mass extermination for Jews. In describing
which still makes painful reading.16
had witnessed killings by gas at the
what went on in Bełżec, he specifically menBełżec extermination camp. Gerstein
Wistrich writes that Karski encountered
tioned murder by poison gas.
joined the SS to oppose the Nazi
“a mixture of political hypocrisy, narrow naOn his return to London in November
regime from within and he asked von
tional self-interest and sheer indifference in
1942, Karski informed the Polish governthose Western political and military leaders
ment, which on December 10, 1942, formally Otter to report to his government on
the atrocities. At that time the official
who had the possibility of ameliorating the
appealed to the Allied governments to speak
policy1 in Sweden was to not anger Nazi
Jewish tragedy in a larger or smaller way.”17
out against the extermination of the Jews.
Germany by publishing reports on war
After the war, Karski settled in the US, where
This resulted a week later in an Allied deccrimes. There is much obscurity about
he became a professor of political science at
laration that condemned for the first time
von Otter’s report.
Georgetown University. For his outstanding
the Nazi “bestial policy of cold-blooded
Key words: Holocaust, international
deeds during the war he was awarded the
extermination” and threatened to “ensure
relations, WWII, diplomacy, Nazi Germany.
highest Polish civil and military decorations.
that those responsible for these crimes shall
abstract
Otter met Gerstein. This is a fact. But could he have saved him?
10
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In 1982 Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognized him as “Righteous
Among the Nations”, and in 1994 he was made an honorary
citizen of Israel. In 2012 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in the US.
It should be mentioned that Jan Karski and Göran von Otter
were not the only ones who, each in his or her own way, reported in the summer–autumn of 1942 on the Nazi German extermination machinery. The reports transferred by Gerhart Riegner,
the representative in Switzerland of the World Jewish Congress,
to the American administration are well known and have been
the subject of historical research.18 On the 1st of August 1942,
Riegner learned from a German industrialist that Hitler had
ordered the exterminations of the Jews. The use of gas as the instrument of murder was even specified.19
After a week of investigation and additional confirmation,
Riegner met with an American vice-consul on August 8, 1942.
The latter took him seriously and transferred a report on the
same day to the State Department, but there it was met with
“universal disbelief” and was not disseminated to all concerned.
Riegner did not give up but continued to meet American diplomats in Switzerland in September and October and to provide
them with more documents. The information given by Riegner
was finally released by the State Department on November 24,
1942. Riegner provided the US government “with its first specific
evidence of a German plan for the total extermination of the
Jews”.
Historians on von Otter
In December 1942, the Allied Powers were informed
about the mass extermination of Jews in occupied
Poland.
The first historian who seems to have researched the whereabouts of von Otter’s report is Steven Koblik.20 In his book from
1987, he states that von Otter reported the meeting with Gerstein
to the deputy head of the Swedish legation in Berlin, Eric von
Post, and that the head of the legation, Arvid Richert, also heard
about the reporting on his return to the legation. However, what
was done with von Otter’s report has not been clarified. No
document has been found in Stockholm.21
According to Koblik, information was probably given orally
to a limited number of officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and not in such detail as Gerstein had intended. In an appendix
with documents, Koblik again states that, apparently, no written
report was sent to Stockholm. However, he doubts that von Otter
left no written documentation about his meeting with Gerstein,
as detailed information on the meeting appeared in an aidememoire in English of August 7, 1945, drafted by the Swedish
embassy in London.22
Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén,23 in a book published in
1997, also mention von Otter’s meeting with Gerstein. They share
Koblik’s opinion that it is still not clear what happened to von
Otter’s information and whether it reached Stockholm at all or
remained at the legation in Berlin. Unlike Koblik, however, they
discovered von Otter’s letter of July 23, 1945, to the Swedish embassy in London. The aide-memoire that Koblik mentioned was
obviously based on a letter from von Otter.
Tydén24 confirms that von Otter’s letter is the only document
(apart from the aide-memoire in English) that has been found
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hitherto in the archives of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This does not exclude the possibility that there could be
other documents that haven’t been found. If it turns out (see
below) that von Otter did report, at least orally, to top officials in
the ministry, the search should be directed to those officials for
any internal or private papers on their meeting with von Otter.
Such a search, however, is outside the scope of this paper.
Paul Levine discusses at more length what could have happened to von Otter’s missing report, and the importance of its
information, in his dissertation on the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Holocaust.25 He doesn’t exclude that a report
may exist, since not writing a report would have contravened
any standard reporting procedures. He also refers to interviews
by other authors with the head of the law department at the ministry, Gösta Engzell. Engzell claimed that he was informed about
the “Gerstein file” quite early, but he could have been mistaken.
The most recent, and probably final, account of Sweden during World War II is Klas Åmark’s book from 2011,26 the result of a
collective research program over several years. Despite its comprehensiveness, the book does not mention von Otter. According to the author,27 the importance of his reporting (whatever
happened to it), has been exaggerated in view of other reporting
that appeared in autumn 1942 from other sources and in Swedish
media. It appears that it was the Swedish embassy, rather than
the Swedish government, that was the main obstacle to the dissemination of von Otter’s information.
In 2012,28 the Swedish author and journalist Göran Rosenberg published a novel about his father, who was from Łodź. He
survived Auschwitz and arrived in Sweden after the war. The
book is partly non-fictional, as it is based on memories, private
correspondence, and public reports.29 In an interview, he mentioned von Otter’s report and concurred with the common view
in Sweden that the report had been misplaced somewhere in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would explain why no attention was paid to it.
Von Otter’s testimonies
It is difficult to acknowledge that von Otter’s report was never
intended to reach the decision-makers in the ministry, and that
if it reached them in some form, it was deliberately ignored and
buried by them. However, that is what emerges from a reading of
testimonies given by Göran von Otter himself and by his daughter Birgitta von Otter. The testimonies were published in 1985
and 1991, respectively, but for some reason they were not taken
into account in the later historical research referred to above.
The Swedish journalist Omar Magnergård published30 in 1985
an anthology of 26 articles on Sweden during WWII, which had
appeared in the daily Svenska Dagbladet in 1984–1985. One of the
articles was an interview with Göran von Otter under the headline “Request to Swedish Diplomat”.
In the interview, von Otter revealed that he had carried a
burden since his meeting with Gerstein in August 1942 and that
he blamed himself for not doing enough. He appears to have had
a bad conscience for two reasons: for not having been able to
rescue Gerstein, who had been arrested as a war criminal, and
11
for failing to act sooner and to make a bigger fuss about what he
had been told.
Concerning his conscience with regard to Gerstein, he acted
by writing a letter dated the 23rd of July 1945 to Karl Gustav Lagerfelt, first secretary at the Swedish embassy in London, obviously
in the hope that the latter would transfer it to the Allied powers.
The letter has been found in the archives and is quoted in full in
the interview. The meeting between von Otter and Gerstein is
described in detail in the letter, as is the latter’s information on
the extermination he had witnessed in Bełżec. Von Otter also
mentions in the letter that he had checked or compared (“collated”) the information with a protestant clergyman and founder
of the Confessing Church, named Otto Dibelius.31
However, Gerstein died in prison on July 25, 1945, the same day
as Lagerfelt received von Otter’s letter. It is not clear whether he
committed suicide or was murdered by Nazi prisoners. Much
later, in 1981, von Otter would visit Gerstein’s widow, Elfriede
Gerstein.
“For Göran, that train trip keeps living on,” Magnergård
writes. That very morning, on his return to Berlin, he started to
draft a report—a report, however, which has not been found and
may have been destroyed. To his disappointment, his superiors
at the legation—no names were mentioned in the interview —
told him to stop writing: “He had better report orally on what
he knew on his next journey home to Stockholm.” His journey
would be delayed by four months, during which time apparently
no report was made to the ministry.
But when von Otter finally reported to the ministry — in the
interview he does not mention to whom in the ministry — the
“superiors in the ministry received my account with an indifference which made me both disappointed and surprised.” “I still
blame myself for my omission to act quicker and to make more
noise about my information”, von Otter told Magnergård.32
To this, Magnergård added that, according to the history professor Wilhelm Carlgren, information about mass executions of
Jews can be found as early as in a handwritten letter from Juhlin
Dannfelt33 to the head of military intelligence Carlos Adlercreutz,
dated October 29, 1941. The source was a Swedish noncommissioned officer who had joined the SS. The letter had been read
by the head of the Swedish central command, ÖB Olof Thörnell,
and his deputy general, Samuel Åkerhielm, and been reported
to General Nils Björk, head of the operational department in the
central command.
However, no one in the higher military and political echelons
in Sweden had apparently paid much attention to this report,
and von Otter’s presumably more detailed (though oral) and
shocking report met the same fate. The earlier report could
possibly have been dismissed as unverified information on war
crimes in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
but von Otter’s report was much worse, as it told about systematic killings of Jewish civilians—men, women, and children—by
gas, with the source a German “insider”.
What is missing in Magnergård’s unique interview with von
Otter is one question: Why didn’t you try more to disseminate
Knowing is a responsibility. To tell or not to tell is the question.
12
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Kurt Gerstein.
the information? Luckily, some answers to this unasked question
can be found in Birgitta von Otter’s book from 1991.34 The book
is mainly an anthology of articles previously published in Swedish media, dailies, magazines, and radio, but with two chapters
added at the end, about the Swedish legation in Berlin during the
war and her father’s meeting with Gerstein.
As a child, between the ages of 2 and 5 years, Birgitta von Otter
lived in Berlin, where her father had been moved in November
1939 after having served shorter periods at the legations in Vienna,
Budapest (where Birgitta was born), and London. He was second
legation secretary, and in 1942 became first legation secretary. She
tells us that about 60 to 70 people worked at the legation in Berlin.
On November 22,1943, the building was totally destroyed in an Allied bomb attack. No Swedish casualties were reported. In the autumn of 1944, the family was relocated home to Stockholm, where
they lived until the end of the war. In May 1945 her father moved
with the family to a new post in Helsinki, Finland.
According to Birgitta von Otter, only two persons at the legation knew of her father’s meeting with Gerstein: the ambassador
himself, Arvid Richert, and his deputy, legation counselor Eric
von Post. The reason for some kind of secrecy at the legation was
that the staff feared that a German spy was working there, namely Richter’s own secretary, who was married to a German Nazi. It
was confirmed after the war that she had been spying.35 Richert
himself is described by Birgitta von Otter as having had to walk a
tightrope not to antagonize the Germans, who often were angry
at the alleged anti-German tone in Swedish media.
In the current situation it’s better to be careful, and it
seems to me that it’s really desirable that several of our
newspapers should adopt a more dignified tone, and
a correct and less wishful treatment of the news and a
less transparent assumption that Germany will finally
lose the war.36
Gerhart Riegner, probably at the meeting of the
World Jewish Congress in Montreux, Switzerland.
Birgitta von Otter obviously felt that her father had been falsely
accused of lying when he had told researchers, such as Koblik, that he never had written a report about his meeting with
Gerstein. Her father didn’t talk very much about what had happened, and she remembers only one occasion when he told
the children about it, or rather replied to their questions. This
seemed to have happened around 1970. She also refers to some
other interviews her father gave to foreign media and researchers (some of which she found on tape in her parents’ home).
She does not exclude the possibility that her father might
have confused what really happened with what he learned
afterwards. She hardly mentions anything about her father’s
personality and opinions, but stresses the similarities between
her father and Gerstein. Von Otter was 35 and Gerstein 37 years
old when they met, each had two children, and they were both
184 cm tall. Birgitta von Otter dwells more on Gerstein and his
upbringing and personality and describes him as a person who
took his Christian faith seriously. She quotes letters between
Gerstein and his father that indicate the existence of a moral
dilemma.
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Göran von Otter, on the other hand, remains a rather unknown figure to people outside his family. He lived and passed
away before the Internet era, and if he ever wrote anything, besides formal reports and documents in his diplomatic service, it
cannot be found on the web.37 If he did write about his work, his
family does not know of any papers or letters left behind which
could help us to understand him and his meeting with Gerstein.38 According to Birgitta von Otter, her father never wrote
a report about his meeting with Gerstein. He was instructed by
Richert, the head of legation, to report orally at his next meeting
at the ministry in Stockholm. Why?
Two possible explanations are given by Birgitta von Otter.
First, the Swedish legation is said to have already known about
the persecution of Jews, thanks to information that its military
attaché had received from oppositional German officers. Furthermore, the Swedish consul in Stettin, Yngve Vendel, had, just
a few days before von Otter returned to the legation after his
train journey, reported “about the same things, although not
in such detail”.39 Vendel’s report was sent to the ministry with a
cover letter signed by Eric von Post on August 22, 1942. Whether
this is convincing or a justifiable reason will be discussed in the
next section.
However, Birgitta von Otter also quotes her father as stating
that the existence of previous information was an acceptable
explanation (i.e., for the order to stop writing the report that
he had started writing on his return), although he was aware
that Vendel did not report on “details such as that people were
forced in naked and that Ukrainian guards were used to extract
the gassed people”. Instead, von Otter reported orally to the
ministry as he had been instructed to do, namely, to the head of
the political department of the ministry, Staffan Söderblom.40
Von Otter also learned that Söderblom had reported on their
meeting to other civil servants in the hierarchy of the ministry,
Deputy Minister Erik Boheman and Foreign Affairs Counselor
Gösta Engzell.41
Second, it appears that von Otter himself did not believe in the
possibility of influencing Nazi Germany’s extermination policy,
and in this he obviously shared Richert’s opinion. He met Gerstein about half a year later in Berlin. Gerstein was eager to know
what von Otter had done to inform the Swedish government.
Von Otter told Gerstein (according to an interview in 1966)42 that
he had informed his superiors but that he was not optimistic
about any concrete results. In another interview, from 1963, he
said: “I don’t believe that any country or government could have
influenced Hitler, who had his own ideas on how Europe should
be formed after the war. In this Europe there was no place at
all for the Jews, and he was fully determined to implement his
Endlösung.”43
Reporting in August 1942
The absence of a written report on von Otter’s information from
the Swedish legation in Berlin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in
Stockholm can be contrasted with the reports that actually were
sent from the legation during the relevant period in 1942.44 It
13
turns out that there was a flow of daily reports from the legation
on a diversity of issues, as if the main occupation of the legation
was to keep the ministry constantly updated. Among other dispatches, the legation drafted press reviews on news in German
media and German reactions to news in Swedish media. The
legation also reported on meetings with German officials or visits
by Swedish officials or personalities to Germany, for example,
the visit in Berlin in June 1942 of the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (reported on June 11, 1942).
The archive files also include reporting from the ministry to the
legation, such as the visit in August to the ministry by the German
ambassador in Stockholm, complaining about the publication
in Swedish media about Norwegian King Haakon’s 70th birthday,
which was considered propaganda against Nazi Germany (reported on August 8, 1942). Another report from the ministry in August
1942 is a translation of a pro-German article from the Swedish consulate in Prague (dated August 17, 1942). A political report from the
legation, dated August 21, 1942, deals with the German occupation
in Europe, but without mentioning anything about the fate of the
Jews. The report refers to an “easing of tension” in the relations
between Nazi Germany and Sweden.
The most dramatic report from August 1942 is no doubt the
one drafted by the Swedish consul in Stettin, Yngve Vendel. The
report was signed by him on August 8, 1942, and sent on the 22nd
of the same month to R. Kumlin, a head of department at the
ministry in Stockholm, with a cover letter signed by the legation
secretary Eric von Post. The report was registered by the ministry on August 24, 1942, and distributed internally and to other
legations and to the military command. Noteworthy is that the
report also reached Swedish prime minister Per Albin Hansson,
as his initials appear on the cover letter.
This arrangement appears to be typical of the correspondence
between the legation and the ministry. Reports were drafted by
different people at the legation and accompanied by cover letters
that summarized their content or drew attention to the main
points in the reports. In this case von Post writes that the report
is based on Vendel’s impressions from talks with different people
during a journey he made in “eastern Germany” with the permission of Richert.
Two pages of Vendel’s seven-page report deal with a conflict
between Heinrich Himmler and the former minister of food and
agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, and this is highlighted and
constitutes the main part in the cover letter. A sentence at the end of
the cover letter states that “Vendel reports about the conditions in
the General Governorate (Poland under Nazi German occupation),
statements by Ribbentrop, and conditions on the large landed estates etc.”45 There is no word about any persecutions of Jews in the
cover letter. Whatever information the report contained about the
situation of the Jews was easy to overlook or underestimate.
The situation of the Jewish population is mentioned twice in
the report. On page 3, Vendel refers to the food conditions in the
general governorate. According to his source, it is often heard that
“Die Juden haben alles” (The Jews have everything). Vendel is critical of this statement and is of the opinion that it is only true of a
small number of “affluent Jews in the Warsaw ghetto”. He corrects
Was the only reason for Sweden to ignore the truth that they were afraid of Nazi Germany?
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Photo: German Federal Archive
14
Photo: German Federal Archive
The German Order Police from Orpo descending to
the cellars on a “Jew-hunt”, Lublin, December 1940.
the statement to “durch die Juden kan man noch alles haben, die
Juden beschaffen alles” (through the Jews you can get everything;
the Jews can supply everything) which must have been a gross exaggeration and a prejudice.46
The next page in his report contains a paragraph with information of such a nature that “it hardly can be rendered in writing”.
Vendel therefore “limit[s myself ] to some brief information”. He
mentions that the treatment of the Jews differs in different places,
depending on whether there are ghettos or not. However, “the
intention is gradually to exterminate them”. The figure of the
Jews already killed in Lublin is estimated at 40,000. In particular,
people over the age of 50 and children under the age of 10 are being killed. He writes that in one town (not named) the Jews were
assembled to be “disinfected” but in reality they were gassed
to death and buried in mass graves. He is of the opinion that his
source is trustworthy and that there “cannot be the slightest
doubt about the veracity of his information”.
This is all that is said about the Jewish situation. It is clear that
there was a huge difference between Vendel’s brief information
above and the detailed information von Otter received from
Gerstein during a whole night of talking in the train between
Warsaw and Berlin. Von Otter himself indicated in his letter to
Lagerfelt at the Swedish embassy in London the detailed account
he received of the extermination machinery in Bełżec. Lagerfelt
repeated the account, without mentioning von Otter’s name,
in his aide-memoire and added that his source had been shown
“documents, identification cards and orders from the commandant of the camp for the delivery of hydrocyanic acid”.47
Furthermore, Gerstein himself wrote a lengthy report during
his imprisonment at the end of the war.48 It is likely that von Otter received more or less the same information from him when
they met. It is therefore difficult to understand how Vendel’s
brief report could have motivated the legation to suppress von
Otter’s reporting as superfluous.
Conclusions
Photo: German Federal Archive
Jewish women in occupied Lublin, September 1939.
Jewish men are transported from the Warsaw
Ghetto by Wehrmacht soldiers, Poland, 1941.
As emerges from the above, Göran von Otter did explain why he did
not report in writing. According to Birgitta von Otter, he received
instructions from his superiors not to write a report. Birgitta von
Otter is a close relative and may be biased, but there is no reason to
doubt her account on this point. It is also possible that Göran von
Otter was of the opinion that a written report would not have made
any difference. This could explain his inaction in 1942—which he
later regretted—but could also be an ex-post justification.
The result, however, might have been the same, considering the overall Swedish policy at that time, when Nazi Germany
was at the height of its power, of appeasing the Nazi regime and
avoiding doing anything that could anger it, even invoking a variety of measures to suppress press freedom in Sweden.49 It is also
striking that some people in Sweden — including some among
the clergy, the military, and the government — who received reports on the Holocaust, shared anti-Semitic stereotypes.50 If they
supported Nazi Germany or believed in its victory, they were less
inclined to arouse any public opinion or issue any government
statements against the ongoing genocide of the Jewish people.
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It is, of course, impossible to know what would have happened if a written report had been delivered by von Otter.51
However, in the author’s opinion, it cannot be dismissed that
a written report, made public by the Swedish government or
transferred secretly to the Allied powers, could have added more
credibility to the other reports from the same period (forming
a “critical mass”) and pressed the US and Britain to act more
forcibly. It might have induced the Allied powers to act sooner
to condemn Nazi Germany and to intervene to stop the daily killings. A written report could also have been studied and revived
later by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs — after all, the
horrors of the Holocaust had become fully known only after the
liberation of the camps—and prompted the Swedish government
to do more by way of rescue operations towards the end of the
war when it no longer had to fear any Nazi German reprisals.52
Von Otter may have felt that he had betrayed Gerstein, who,
with his own life in danger, had asked him to immediately transfer the information to his own Swedish government and through
it to the Allied powers. He did not manage to save Gerstein’s life
because he seems to have acted too late and in an indirect way.
Gerstein turned himself in to the French forces on April 21, 1945,
and was sent to a prison in Paris towards the end of May. We cannot know if and when von Otter learned about Gerstein’s imprisonment and trial. Did he actively try to find out his whereabouts?
The newspaper France-Soir reported about his trial on July 5,
1945. Only on July 23, 1945, did von Otter write his letter to the
Swedish legation in London.53
As mentioned in the beginning, the role of different civil
servants at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is outside the
scope of this study. However, the role of the person whom von
Otter met in Stockholm, the head of the political department,
Staffan Söderblom, seems at first glance questionable.54 The
head of the legation in Berlin, Arvid Richert, was biased in his
attitude towards Nazi Germany and sometimes pursued his own
agenda. Both Richert and his deputy, von Post, seem to have
opposed any public Swedish appeals or the issuance of Swedish
protective passports for the Jews even in February–March 1945.55
When instructing von Otter not to finish his written report,
Richert may have abused his power. If Richert was afraid that a
written report might have been discovered by the Germans, he
should, of course, have instructed von Otter to travel immediately to Stockholm to report. A Swedish report would have supported other reports from this time and could not have been easily
dismissed by the Allied powers. Richert was probably not aware
of these other reports, but in suppressing von Otter’s report he
deliberately took a decision that showed his attitude towards reporting on the Nazi German crimes against humanity.
To understand retrospectively von Otter and his reporting, one
must take into account the environment at the legation in Berlin
and the ministry in Stockholm during the war. It appears that
it was influenced by pro-German feelings — dating from long
before the outbreak of World War II — and a fear of antagonizing
Nazi Germany, at least when it looked as if Germany would win
the war.56 Von Otter was a man with a conscience — this is proven
15
by his attempt to save Gerstein — but it also appears that, if there
was any conflict between conscience and career he may have
given priority to his career. It is tragic that he not only did not
succeed in transmitting Gerstein’s information to the ministry
in an effective way, or make it public in some other way, but also
failed to save the life of Gerstein, the person he obviously felt an
obligation to save.
However, it would be unfair to compare von Otter with Karski. Jan Karski was a Polish officer who fought for his own country under occupation by Nazi Germany and who felt a strong
empathy for his persecuted people, irrespective of religion.
Karski was prepared to risk his own life by entering ghettos and
camps in disguise to collect firsthand information on the ongoing extermination, and then to secretly travel to Britain to inform
the Polish government in exile and the Allied powers. Karski was
both an eyewitness and an emissary on behalf of the Polish government in exile.
Von Otter did not have to risk his life and, luckily, hardly anyone did in the Swedish legation or the ministry. He happened
by chance to receive information from a trustworthy witness
who begged him to forward it to the Swedish government. After
having met Gerstein on the train, he met the protestant clergyman Dibelius in Berlin to verify the information. We will never
know what Dibelius told him, but he might have been the wrong
person to ask for advice. Von Otter was probably not aware that
Dibelius was an anti-Semite and that the information may have
fallen on deaf ears.57 He managed more or less to carry out the
mission—which he had not chosen himself—but in a way that did
not leave any trace in Sweden and did not have any impact whatsoever on the course of events. The responsibility for the latter,
however, falls on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both von Otter
and Karski met with indifference and disbelief in their reporting.
One can speculate as to whether another person in the same
situation would have moved heaven and earth to disseminate
the information, even though it might have caused him or her
discomfort. Von Otter was a civil servant of relatively low rank
at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the same background
as most people in the ministry at that time, and did as he was
instructed by his superiors, who all expected that Nazi Germany
would be victorious. On the other hand, von Otter belonged to a
distinguished noble family. Possibly, he could have tried harder
to deliver a written report on Gerstein’s shocking information,
especially as he had taken some trouble to verify who Gerstein
was. It cannot be totally excluded that such a report does exist
somewhere.
Nonetheless, the meeting with Gerstein made a strong impression on him, which explains why he remembered it years
later. It was not his fault that his report—which according to him
was presented orally—did not attract the interest of his superiors
at the ministry. This was rather the result of inconsistent reporting procedures at the ministry and the inability on the part of
von Otter’s superiors to distinguish between important and less
important reporting. Their judgment can be questioned, in particular, that of Staffan Söderblom, who happened to be head of
There were other reports. Why are they not missing if no one wanted to know?
peer-reviewed essay
Photo: INSTITUTE OF NATIONAL REMEMBRANCE
16
the political department of the ministry at the time and who only
a few years later would mislead his own ministry and fail in the
Wallenberg affair.58 ≈
Mose Apelblat, former official at the European Commission.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Ms. Anne Sofie von Otter and
Ms. Birgitta von Otter. I am also thankful to Professor Klas Åmark and
Professor Mattias Tydén and to Ms. Karolina Famulska-Ciesielska at
the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. Special thanks go to the
Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.
Photo: JEWISH HISTORICAL INSTITUTE
Deportation of 10,000 Polish Jews to Treblinka during the liquidation of the ghetto in Siedlce beginning
August 23, 1942.
references
1Although no prior censorship was applied, news about alleged war crimes
and atrocities was considered “cruelty propaganda” and suppressed in
various legal ways. Newspapers may also have applied self-censorship.
See Klas Åmark, ed., Att bo granne med ondskan: Sveriges förhållande
till Nazismen, Nazityskland och Förintelsen [To be neighbors with
evil: Sweden’s relation to Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust]
(Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2011), ch. 6, “Tryckfrihet and
presspolitik i andra världskrigets skugga” [Freedom of expression and
press policy in the shadow of WWII].
2 Quotation from Maciej Sadowski, Jan Karski Photobiography (Warszawa:
VEDA, 2014).
3 The Swedish diplomatic representation in Berlin before and during
the Second World War was called a legation, which was lower than an
embassy. After the war it was upgraded to embassy.
4 Birgitta von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar [Umbilical cords’ and
Fools Mirrors] (Stockholm: Alba, 1991), 268. The author does not give any
more details about this task.
Jews being loaded onto trains to Treblinka at the
Warsaw Ghetto’s Umschlagplatz, 1942.
5 Ibid., 280 (excerp from Gerstein’s own account).
6 See papers from the international conference in Zamość in November
2013, “Jan Karski: Witness, Emissary, Man”, http://www.jpost.com/
International/Memory-of-Polands-Jan-Karski-early-reporter-of-theHolocaust-honored-330959.
7 He was born Jan Kozielewski. During the war he adopted Karski as his
nom de guerre and became known to the world by this name.
8 Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 2001), 213.
9 Jan Karski had Jewish friends at school in Łodź and Jewish teachers at
the university in Lvov. After the war, in 1965, he married Pola Nirénska, a
choreographer and dancer of Polish–Jewish origin. About one third of the
670,000 inhabitants in Łodź before the war were Jews. Almost immediately
after the Nazi German occupation, a ghetto was established in Łodź. When
the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, 200,000 Jews had been killed.
10 Wistrich, Hitler, 213—214.
11 Marian Marek Drozdowski, Jan Karski Kozielewski, 1914—2000:
The Emissary who Sought Help from the Allied Powers for the Polish
Underground State and Holocaust Victims (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza
ASPRA, 2014), ch. 8.
12 The two persons whom Karski met in Warsaw have been identified as
peer-reviewed essay
leaders of the Jewish resistance organization, one representing the Zionist
organizations and the other the Jewish socialist organization Bund. In
their desperation they asked Karski to convey to the allied powers that
they should bomb German cities without mercy and drop leaflets telling
the Germans about the fate of the Jews in Poland, threatening them that
this would also happen to the Germans during and after the war. They
thought that this was the only way to put an end to the Nazi-German
atrocities. According to Nir Rakovski, Karski was not taken to Bełżec but
to a transit camp in Izbica Lubelska, halfway between Lublin and Bełżec,
where he witnessed awful scenes. See Jan Karski, Courier from Poland:
The Story of a Secret State, French to Hebrew trans. Nir Rakovski (Tel Aviv:
Sifrei Aliyat Hagag, 2014), 374 and 390.
13 T
he Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, a statement issued
on December 17, 1942, by the American and British governments on behalf
of the Allied powers.
14 According to Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and
Stalin (London: Vintage Books, 2011), 213—217, when the invasion of
the Soviet Union did not go as planned, Hitler changed strategy and
the extermination of the Jews became his main wartime policy. For a
comprehensive analysis of what the Allied powers knew and the possible
reasons for not understanding and not acting, see Daniel Tilles, Passive
Accomplices or Helpless Bystanders? British and American Responses to the
Holocaust, 1941—1945 (Craków: Galicia Jewish Museum, 2008) 110—135.
15 Jan Karski, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1944).
16 Two of the last chapters in his book describe his secret visits to the
Warsaw ghetto and the transit camp Izbica Lubelska in vivid and terrifying
language. What he witnessed defies human comprehension.
17 Wistrich, Hitler, 214.
18 Arthur Morse, While Six Millions Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy
(New York: Random House, 1968), 3—36.
19 According to Wistrich (Hitler, 144), Riegner had already on March 3,
1942, sent a “remarkably detailed report on the fate of the Jews in Poland
and the rest of Europe”, which reached the Vatican through the papal
nuncio in Bern. It spoke of “more than a million Jews exterminated by the
Germans”, pointing out that the old, the sick, and women and children
were being systematically deported, a measure that clearly could not have
been implemented for the purposes of forced labor.
20 Steven Koblik, Om vi teg, skulle stenarna ropa: Sverige och judeproblemet,
1933—1945 [The Stones Cry Out: Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of
the Jews, 1933—1945], Swedish trans. Erik Frykman (Stockholm: Norstedts
Förlag, 1987), 66, 67, 148—150, 266.
21 As is mentioned later on in the study, only Richert and von Post knew
about von Otter’s meeting with Gerstein. Von Post normally attached
cover letters to the reports drafted by the embassy staff.
22 The aide-memoire is based on a letter dated July 23, 1942, from von Otter
to Lagerfelt, first secretary at the embassy in London (see Koblik, Stones
Cry Out, 266—267). Von Otter’s letter, although drafted almost three years
after his meeting with Gerstein, gives quite a detailed account of the
meeting; see excerpt in Birgitta von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar,
271. The letter is included in extenso in Omar Magnergård’s interview
with Göran von Otter, I andra världskrigets skugga. Birgitta von Otter also
quotes an interview on tape with her father, made in the beginning of the
1980s when he was well over 70 years old, where her father reproduces,
in detail, what Gerstein had told him about the killing of the Jews in death
chambers using exhaust gas from trucks (Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar,
273). This information was probably not known to Koblik.
23 Ingvar Svanberg and Mattias Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen: Debatt
och dokument om Europas judar 1933—1945 [Sweden and the Holocaust:
debate and documents on the Jews of Europe 1933—1945] (Stockholm:
17
Arena,1997), 38, 236—237. The authors give a detailed overview of the
reporting on the Holocaust in Swedish newspapers, with extensive
extracts from the articles. The persecutions and mass murders of the Jews
in Nazi-occupied countries were known in Sweden as early as 1942. What
was less known, before 1943, was how the killings were carried out.
24 Clarification by e-mail of June 9, 2013, from Tydén to the writer.
25 Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the
Holocaust (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996), 123.
26 Åmark, Granne med ondskan.
27Clarification in e-mail of June 17, 2013, from Åmark to the writer.
28Göran Rosenberg, Ett kort uppehåll på vägen från Auschwitz [A brief stop
on the way from Auschwitz] (Falun: Bonnier, 2012).
29 At about the same time as von Otter met Gerstein, “between 3 and 12
September 1942, 15,859 children, sick and elderly people from the ghetto
in Łodź had been killed in gas vans in Chelmo”(Rosenberg, Kort uppehåll,
55).
30 Magnergård, Skugga.
31 Gerstein also disclosed his information to Dibelius, who, according to
Birgitta von Otter (Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar, 271), conveyed it to the
Swedish archbishop Erling Eidem. Regarding Dibelius and the church
in Germany, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966),
[references to 1997 paperback ed.], 108—114. According to Goldhagen,
Dibelius had described himself as an anti-Semite even before Hitler came
to power and had expressed the logic of the reigning eliminationalist
anti-Semitism. According to Åmark (Granne med ondskan, 330, 334—336),
Eidem’s activity with regard to Nazi Germany and the persecutions of
the Jews is disputed. Koblik, who devotes a whole chapter in his book to
Eidem and the Swedish organization for the religious conversion of Jews
(SIM, Svenska Israelmissionen), paints a more detailed picture of Eidem’s
role, but reaches the same conclusion: He did not act on the information
he received from Dibelius among others because he was influenced by
the Swedish government, which considered information about the Nazi
German extermination campaign a “potential security risk” against
Swedish interests and relations with Nazi Germany (Koblik, Stones Cry
Out,106). When he refused to issue an appeal for the Hungarian Jews, he
first asked the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs whether it would be the
correct thing to do. The reply was affirmative (Ibid., 112). This happened
as late as July 1944, when it was only a matter of time before Nazi Germany
would be defeated, and Sweden had little to fear from its reaction.
32 Magnergård, Skugga.
33 Curt Juhlin Dannfelt was military attaché at the Swedish legation in
Berlin during the whole Nazi period (1933—1945) and was considered
a competent and reliable person. However, the Swedish security or
intelligence service reported to the government only at its own discretion
(Koblik, Stones Cry Out, 147). An investigation by the security service
during the war showed that up to 10% of the officer corps were suspected
of being Nazis or pro-German (Åmark, Granne med ondskan, 298).
Though a small minority, it was more than in the general population. The
pro-German “National Sweden—Germany Society” had many officers
among its members, some of them with high rank. The commander of
the defense forces, Olof Thörnell, had himself congratulated Hitler on his
50th birthday. Åmark (Granne med ondskan, 300) writes that a general,
Samuel Åkerhielm, had been compromised because of (presumably)
pro-German statements. Both Olof Thörnell and his successor Helge Jung
favored a Swedish military intervention on the side of Finland against the
Soviet Union. (This would effectively have put Sweden on Nazi Germany’s
side and could have been a secondary motive among pro-German officers.
Author’s comment.)
34 Von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar.
18
peer-reviewed essay
35 Ibid., 258.
36 Ibid., 259, letter by Richert on September 2, 1942, to the ministry. Richert
is characterized by Åmark as one who staunchly advocated that Sweden
should conduct a friendly and positive policy towards Nazi Germany to
secure its role in a Nazi-dominated Europe after the war (Åmark, Granne
med ondskan, 101, 108).
37 Judging from von Otter’s letter to Lagerfelt, he was a good writer, and his
Swedish still reads well and is easy to understand.
38 E-mail of August 22, 2013, from Ann Sofie von Otter to the author of this
article.
39 Von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar, 274.
40 Staffan Söderblom, the son of Nathan Söderblom (Sweden’s most famous
archbishop before the war), was head of the political department during
1938—1944. During 1944—1946 he was Swedish envoy (ambassador) to
Moscow, where he dealt with the Raoul Wallenberg affair. An official
Swedish commission (SOU 2003:18) on the Wallenberg affair and its
management by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs was very critical
of Söderblom’s reporting and handling of the affair. It appears that his
policy was to do anything to avoid antagonizing the Soviet government.
See Ett diplomatiskt misslyckande: Fallet Raoul Wallenberg och den svenska
utrikesledningen [A diplomatic failure: The case of Raoul Wallenberg
and the Swedish foreign authorities], SOU 2003:18, 151—161, http://www.
regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/1455. In the report Söderblom’s reporting
from Moscow is described as whitewashing. A colleague describes his
management of the political department in Stockholm as a dictatorship.
In 1954 Söderblom was put on leave for personal reasons. Birgitta von
Otter has drawn my attention to an interview with her father in Paris
in 1981 by Gitta Sereny, according to which Staffan Söderblom told
Göran von Otter, at their meeting, to forget everything and wished him
a pleasant vacation. See Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth,
(London: Vintage Books, 1995), 355—359.
41 Gösta Engzell was head of the legal department of the ministry during
the war. After the war he told authors who interviewed him that he had
been informed about Gerstein much earlier. For an evaluation of his
role as administrative rescuer in a situation of moral ambiguity, see also
Paul Levine’s paper “Teaching the Hero in Holocaust History: The Case
of Raoul Wallenberg and Gösta Engzell”, October 14, 1999, http://www.
yadvashem.org/download/education/conf/Levine.pdf.
42 Von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar, 286.
43 Ibid., 286—287.
44 The correspondence from and to the embassy during the months June—
September 1942, is in the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) in
Stockholm. The documents referred to in the text can be found in dossiers
HP 1 Ct vol. 321, 322, 323, 324, 325 (UD 1920 dossier system).
45 Vendel, P.M. (Promemoria/Memorandum), dated Berlin, August 22, 1942,
quotation from cover letter (Swedish National Archives).
46 Vendel obviously never entered the Warsaw ghetto, as Karski did. If he
had, he would not have written as he did. From autumn 1940 to July 1942,
about 92,000 Warsaw Jews died of starvation and disease. (Karski, Courier
from Poland). In July 1942, the first deportations to the extermination
camp Treblinka started. By September 1942, about 300,000 Jews had been
murdered. After two months of killings in the ghetto and deportations to
Treblinka perhaps 60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. See also Snyder,
Bloodland), 263—269 on the deportations to Treblinka and 280—292 on the
uprising in the ghetto.
47 Koblik, Stones Cry Out, 267.
48 Von Otter, Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar, 291—297.
49 Åmark, Granne med ondskan, chap. 6—7.
50 Ibid., ch. 11. It is noteworthy that Söderblom, in one of his reports from
Moscow, describes the purging of Jews in the administration as a means of
avoiding the reoccurrence of anti-Semitism in the country (SOU 2003:18,
154). See also Åmark, Granne med ondskan, 368, on the influence of antiSemitism in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
51 Daniel Tilles is skeptical as to whether an additional report would have
had any effect in inducing a firmer response from the US or UK (e-mail
of January 28, 2015, from Tilles to the author). According to Tilles,
both countries already had plenty of information; the problem was
(a) the collation and analysis of that information, but also, and more
importantly,(b) the lack of willingness to act on the information (for
various reasons). Klas Åmark shares the assessment (e-mail of December
9, 2013, to the author) that it was the aggregated reporting on the
Holocaust that influenced the Allied powers during the war, and that it is
not very likely that their willingness would have been affected by a written
report by von Otter directly after his meeting with Gerstein.
52 Koblik, Stones Cry Out, 157—158.
53 In his aide-memoire of August 7, 1945, Lagerfelt does not mention von
Otter by name but refers to a “member of a neutral embassy in Berlin”.
On August 14, 1945, Lagerfelt informed von Otter about his aide-memoire
and pointed out that von Otter’s name was not indicated (von Otter,
Navelsträngar och Narrspeglar, 300).
54 According to Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the
Truth About Hitler’s “Final Solution” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 65—67
(reference is to the German translation in paperback, 1982), Söderblom
said about von Otter’s report: “We thought that it was too risky to
transfer information from one belligerent party to another.” He is also
said to have remarked that many rumors were floating around during
that time. Laqueur wrote that Söderblom’s argument could hardly be
taken seriously, since there were, of course, different means and ways
to forward the news without implicating the Swedish government as the
source.
55 Koblik, Stones Cry Out, 255—257.
56 The role of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not been studied
in detail by the author of this article. The ministry could have asked
von Otter to write a report after hearing him, but evidently did not.
Åmark (Granne med ondskan, 536) mentions that the head of the legal
department at the ministry, Gösta Engzell (who, according to Göran
von Otter’s testimony, had been informed by Söderblom about his
meeting with Gerstein), was engaged in the Swedish activities at the end
of November 1942 to rescue Norwegian Jews. Von Otter’s meeting with
Söderblom took place around January 1943, so any information from that
meeting could not have influenced Engzell (unless he had known about
the information much earlier). Altogether, 1100 Jews fled from Norway to
Sweden with the support of the Norwegian underground movement. In
October 1943 the majority of the Danish Jews (7900 persons, according
to Åmark, Granne med ondskan, 538) were rescued by boat to Sweden.
However, the action came too late for the 770 Norwegian Jews who had
been deported of whom the majority were murdered in Auschwitz.
Sweden felt a special responsibility for the Jewish citizens in a neigboring
Nordic country and for Jews with a connection to Sweden. For a detailed
overview of the reporting and protests in Sweden against the deportation
of the Jews in Norway, see Svanberg and Tydén, Sverige och Förintelsen,
ch. 12.
57 See note 31.
58 See Ingrid Carlberg’s article, “Raoul Wallenberg: Sveriges svek”, Dagens
Nyheter, January 17, 2015, http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/sverigessvek/. She describes the handling of the disappearance of Wallenberg
as a Swedish betrayal and diplomatic failure, in which the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs failed to act on information and uncritically accepted
disinformation. A key person was Staffan Söderblom, the envoy in
Moscow, who in his meetings with the Soviet authorities accepted their
allegation that Wallenberg had fallen victim to an accident.